Why must taxpayers pay to transport kids around the corner to school

Published 7:00 pm, Tuesday, October 9, 2001

Why in the world do taxpayers have to pay for school buses to transport children literally around the corner from their homes to school?

Spring Branch ISD provides bus service for kids who live as close as two blocks - TWO BLOCKS! - from school. Cy-Fair and Katy are no better.

Several weeks ago, I got a call from a parent who complained that the bus that carried his 11-year-old son five blocks home from school had been running consistently late.

He said he felt "betrayed" because a service he paid taxes for wasn't being performed.

We're talking about five blocks here. A half-mile, if you stretch it - 2,640 feet - eight homerun trots around the bases. Less than the distance from the $5 lots to Enron Field, and much, much less distance than a normal kid will travel from his seat back and forth to the concession stands during the course of an Astros game.

My 9-year-old grandson runs more than that just between the kitchen and the swimming pool on a typical summer day.

"I don't want my kid walking home with things the way they are," the distraught parent told me.

We were talking about Memorial Middle School at Vindon and Attingham. Not exactly a high-crime neighborhood. Nor high traffic except for when the school buses and SUVs are unloading or loading all those non-perambulating students.

I do not often bring up the Good Old Days, because they weren't all that good. These days are much better.

But just because we have it good doesn't give us the right to make vegetables of our children. Kids can cope with hot weather, traffic and the other mysteries of the outdoors a lot better than we might think.

"I never rode a school bus after we moved to town," I said the other day. "In fact, the school district didn't provide transportation for kids who lived in the city."

"But things were different then," an acquaintance some 20 years younger said. "You didn't have the traffic or crime to deal with."

Not so. I attended inner-city schools. More crime and more traffic than is common in our quiet neighborhoods, with a few exceptions, of course.

Another acquaintance suggested that the Houston climate, which runs the gamut from excessively hot to excessively wet, requires universal bus service.

"It rains quite a bit," she said. "Kids shouldn't have to walk to school in the rain."

"I did," I said.

"But when you were in school, you didn't have air conditioning," she said.

This is my favorite part: Not having air conditioning, it seems, is an advantage because wet kids catch colds if forced to sit in an air-conditioned room.

That being the case - and ignoring the bad science - wouldn't it be cheaper just to turn the air conditioning off on rainy days rather than send out all those gas-guzzling buses?